"The Apu Trilogy" 3: THE WORLD OF APU

Thursday, December 17th, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu was written by Tim Brayton, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A newly restored 4K DCP of The World of Apu, the final film in Ray's Apu trilogy, will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, December 18, at 7 p.m.

By Tim Brayton

The English-language title of Apur Sansar, the 1959 finale of Satyajit Ray's monumental trilogy about the youth and young adulthood of one Apu Roy, translates as The World of Apu. It's a fitting label for a film that moves away from the domestic intimacy of Pather Panchali and Aparajito to depict, if not the world of Apu, then certainly the world and Apu; it is a story of the discovery that one is not, after all, the main character in the grand narrative of the universe, that there's a whole teeming mass of humans with their own needs and dreams. This is clear even from the opening scene, which ends with the main character (played this time by radio announcer Soumitra Chatterjee, making his film debut) overhearing the sounds of political radicals agitating on the street. It's the first time in the trilogy that the outside world muscles its way into Apu's awareness through his comfortable self-regard; it will not be the last.

The World of Apu is a story in two parts, each of them describing the process by which a pleasant and selfish young man grows up. In the beginning, Apu is doggedly trying to write an autobiographical novel and receiving no positive feedback for it. To get him out of his head, his friend drags him to a wedding, where events transpire that would fit right into the fabric of a particularly absurd romantic comedy. It seems that the groom has lost his mind, and the mother of the bride won't let the marriage go on. According to local custom, however, if the bride Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) doesn't marry on this date, she will be forever after branded as unmarriageable. With some goading, Apu agrees to save the day by getting married.

This is nothing if not contrived, but Ray and his two extraordinary lead actors (who would both return to collaborate with the director several times) invest their scenario with great depth of feeling. There are few filmed depictions of the giddy rush of young marriage that have anything like the sweetness of Apu and Aparna's shy, clumsy happiness around each other. Their nervous glances during her first night in his cramped bachelor pad give way to charmingly low-key bliss as the couple settles into their domestic roles. Robin Wood described this as "one of the cinema's classic affirmative depictions of married life," and there are few movies indeed that derive so much of their power and pleasure from presenting a wholly functional romantic relationship. Nor does the film focus solely on the lovers in their intimate moments: it contrasts the central relationship with the full, noisy life of the city – the sound of crying babies is used as an important repeating motif – and plays Apu's goofy, swooning romanticism against the workaday reality of the city around him to touching, and at times comic effect.

Following his two debut films, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Ray shifted away from their steady realist aesthetic: The Philosopher's Stone (1958) is a magical realist comedy, while The Music Room (also 1958) is a mood piece set inside a costume drama. With The World of Apu, he turned back in the direction of realism, although it would be impossible to pretend that the director's excursions into new styles and storytelling forms didn't inform the feel of his fifth feature. Compared to the rawness of the other Apu films, The World of Apu is more polished and confident in its artistic gestures. A cinema screen dissolving into the rear window of a cab (with its attendant implication that the world outside the cab is just as rife with entertainment as the movies), for example, is the kind of flourish that would never have fit into the sparer aesthetic modes of the earlier films.

Where Ray's new artistic control is shown off to best affect is in the film's second and shorter part, in which Apu deals with tragedy by dropping out of life to become a wanderer, abandoning his family, his artistic ambitions, and the world itself. The tone of the film is much closer to the intellectual moodiness and abstraction of The Music Room than anything in the concrete realism of the previous films in the trilogy, with Subrata Mitra's cinematography striving for a more self-consciously epic scope in its accumulation of wide exteriors and intense close-ups, and Ravi Shankar's score frequently eschewing the comforting tunefulness he'd brought to the earlier films. It is filmmaking that privileges open, raw emotion above all things, using the landscape itself as an extension of personality – especially in the powerful final image, a variation on the closing shots of Pather Panchali and Aparajito, that soundlessly communicates the growth as a responsible human that Apu has experienced.

The World of Apu is typically regarded as the least of the three films, a judgment made by critics from Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader to the AV Club, in its review of the recent 4K restorations under the auspices of the Criterion Collection, which the Cinematheque has been showing throughout December. Perhaps this criticism is fair; certainly, the screentime devoted to a strong female foil for Apu – arguably the greatest strength of both of the previous films – is notably lacking compared to the prominence given to his sister in Pather Panchali and his mother in Aparajito (Tagore is wonderful, but it takes the film quite some time to arrive at her). The film is a remarkable piece of humanist art on its own terms, however, telling a story of fatherly responsibility that's thoughtful and profound in ways that well-worn theme often isn't; and Chatterjee is a revelation as Apu, by turns arrogant and soft, tender and wrathful. It is a film to be cherished no less than its predecessors, and it marks the conclusion of one of cinema's most brilliantly sustained series, a portrait of childish self-interest blossoming into adulthood that soars like no other coming-of-age story in all of film.

Matt Connolly on THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER

Friday, December 11th, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Cornere was written by Matt Connolly, Ph.D. candidate in UW Madison Dept. of Communication Arts. Shop will screen as the final Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen, in the Chazen Museum of Art, on Sunday, December 13 at 2 p.m. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we are not able to screen the film on 35mm as originally announced. A DVD will be shown in its place.

By Matt Connolly

Writing in Film Comment on the striking paucity of films dealing with the workplace as a concrete reality of everyday life, Kent Jones notes at least one movie that honors the daily grind with neither an overreliance on cynicism nor an overdose of sentimentality. “What separates The Shop Around the Corner from almost every other work-centered movie is its honesty,” says Jones of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy, adding that it’s “known for its ingenious and delicate romantic entanglements, but it would be nothing without this frank acknowledgment of human fallibility in the workplace, unencumbered by moral hierarchies.”

Jones is one of our very finest critics, and there’s little I can say in response to his broader analysis of The Shop Around the Corner’s nuanced portrait of retail labor besides an enthusiastic nod of the head. I can only add that the film’s great strength and singularity lies in how effortlessly it links the aforementioned “ingenious and delicate romantic entanglements” of its protagonists with the workplace in which they squabble, negotiate, and finally connect with one another. Few films so strikingly underscore the barriers we attempt to place between our work and our private lives, only to reveal (with great wit and insight) how inevitably fuzzy that line really is.

In true romantic comedy fashion, the eventual couple at the center of The Shop Around the Corner meet cute. Unbeknownst to them for much of the movie, they actually do it twice. Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), the top salesman at leather goods shop Matuschek and Company, has answered a newspaper personals ad placed by a fellow Budapest resident. He delights in their written exchanges on literature, culture, and ideas, and hopes that it will develop into a real-life romance. Around the same time, he meets Klara Novak (Margaret Sullivan), who comes to Matuschek and Company seeking a job and who is soon hired after selling a particularly undesirable cigarette box to a fellow customer. (The cigarette box plays a grating rendition of “Ochi Chërnye” whenever it’s opened, but Klara reframes the item as a candy box whose tune reminds one to watch their consumption of sweets.) Alfred and Klara quickly grate on one another at work, while both privately continue a rewarding written back-and-forth with their respective pen pals. (Klara has also found a smart and charming companion via the newspaper.)

Needless to say, Alfred and Klara are one another’s mystery correspondents—a charming contrivance in and of itself, but one that takes on evermore humorous and poignant dimensions as the film progresses. Alfred eventually discovers that Klara is the woman on the other end of the letters, keeping the revelation under wraps as he attempts to pursue her in person. Klara rebuffs these tentative advances by drawing withering contrasts between Alfred and the man with whom she’s been writing to. In a stinging rebuke, she dismisses Alfred as “a little insignificant clerk.” The moment lands with particular impact as it succinctly underscores how inconceivable it is to Klara that the poetic, intellectually engaged man with whom she’s been falling for might also occupy the same quotidian workplace as herself. (In fairness, Alfred feels much the same way about Klara before discovering her true identity.) Both Klara and Alfred so strive to distance themselves from the commonplace nature of their job that they’re largely blind to the fellow dreamer right beside them.

So much of The Shop Around the Corner rests upon a knowing—and knowingly empathetic—conception of how work fosters relationships at once tender and uneasy. It’s one of the film’s great unspoken jokes that, though we hear snippets of their poetry-laden letters to one another, it is Alfred and Klara’s snappish workplace repartee that let us know how truly aligned they are in intellect and emotional temperament. Their relationship exists within a wider network of friendships, alliances, and affinities throughout the staff of Matuschek and Company. And while at least one of these is revealed to be built on deception, most exude a kind of ambivalent warmth, illuminating the singular blend of affection and proximity that defines so many workplace bonds. The complex rapport between Alfred and shop owner Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan) particularly exemplifies this, with Hugo looking upon Alfred as variously a mentee, subordinate, romantic rival, and surrogate son.

The Shop Around the Corner fittingly concludes on Christmas Eve, a traditional time to gather with loved ones that’s also a typical financial windfall for retail stores. The delicate imbrication of professional and personal intimacies that the film charts so well find their logical conclusion in these last moments: the triumph of teamwork; the bonds of time and labor; the gradual dissipation of the group as each one says their goodnights and heads home to spouses and children, or parents, or friends, or an empty house or apartment. We are finally left with our two would-be lovers, chatting as they close up shop for the hundredth (or thousandth) time. It’s just another day of work—a prospect within which The Shop Around the Corner finds both the most prosaic of pleasures and the most precious of possibilities.

"The Apu Trilogy" 2: APARAJITO

Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Satyajit Ray's Aparajito was written by Tim Brayton, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A newly restored 4K DCP of Aparajito, the second film in Ray's Apu trilogy, will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, December 11, at 7 p.m.

By Tim Brayton

Satyajit Ray had no plans to make a sequel to his directorial debut, Pather Panchali, but that film's enormous success both in India and internationally caused him to relent. Thus his second effort was a sequel, Aparajito [aka The Unvanquished], which bridges novelist Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee's two novels about young Apu Roy, depicting his growth from childhood to college. It begins shortly after Pather Panchali ended: Apu (Pinaki Sengupta) and his parents, mother Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) and father Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) have recently moved from their rural home to the great city of Benares, one of the most spiritual places in India, so that Harihar may ply his trade as a priest.

Although Pather Panchali and its tragedies rest in the background, Aparajito does not require familiarity with the earlier work to appreciate its profound richness as a great humanist document complete unto itself. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, one of the few prominent Western critics who had little enthusiasm for Pather Panchali, referred to Aparajito in haunted, glowing terms: "done with such rare feeling and skill at pictorial imagery… develops a sort of hypnotism for the serene and tolerant viewer." The famed cultural critic Sigfried Kracauer ended his 1960 Theory of Film with an encomium to the film's spiritually and morally resonant universality. In more recent years, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has declared Aparajito to be the greatest leg of Ray's Apu trilogy.

The film's unique identity comes in part from its subtle but decisive aesthetic shift from its predecessor. The visual language Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra use in this film ignores the impressionistic qualities of Pather Panchali for something more directly realist. It's a keen decision, mirroring Apu's increasingly unromantic awareness of the world around him as he grows into young adulthood (at which point the role is taken over by Smaran Ghosal), while also capturing something of 1920s Benares and Calcutta—major urban centers in a moment when Indian culture was borrowing parts of its identity from Europe. It's surely no accident that Aparajito's style eschews lyricism for flat realism in tandem with Apu's decision to reject the family business of the priesthood to study English at a Western-style university.

Casting the film in such bluntly symbolic terms, however, robs it of the most important source of its greatness: the relationship between Apu and Sarbajaya, one of the great mother-son stories in all of cinema. Karuna Banerjee, already so great in Pather Panchali, returned to the role with all of the weariness and ragged resolve in place and amplified: even more than before, she's an equal protagonist in this story, which explores in painstaking, painful detail how a loving, widowed mother finds herself inexorably abandoned by the child whose bright future she eagerly supports, even while she understands that his success can only mean an ever-greater distance between them. Her performance of this tension is one of the great triumphs of Aparajito: she describes a remarkable transition from beginning to end, starting with an encouraging but openly baffled expression at Apu's energetic chatter about science, ending with an empty gaze from sullen eyes as her arm hangs lifelessly beside her body as she realizes that her son will not be returning to be with her in her final illness (it was this scene, in particular, that so moved Kracauer). Aparajito is never more moving than when it focuses with sorrow and understanding on Sarbajaya's loneliness; she is cinema's great exemplar of parental sacrifice, a figure who'll leave you anxious to call up your mother the moment the film stops to apologize for every terrible thing you've ever done to her, if only you can stop weeping for long enough to pick up the phone.

The film was a great success in America and Europe, becoming the only sequel ever to win the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. It also continued the dubious trend begun with Pather Panchali of leaving Ray and his austere Bengali art films as the sole Indian exports that international film audiences had much interest in watching. This success wasn't matched at home; Indian audiences that had flocked to Pather Panchali resisted and disliked Aparajito. In his 1958 essay "Problems of a Bengali Filmmaker," Ray surmised that the problem was his boldness in darkening the source material, with a confidence birthed by the first film's unexpected success. "The urban audience which was largely familiar with the plot of Aparajito was irritated by the deviations. As for the suburban audience, it was shocked by the portrayal of the mother and son relationship, so sharply at variance with the conventional notion of mutual sweetness and devotion."

There's no doubt that the family relationship driving Aparajito is stripped of both sweetness and devotion; but the rueful director (who always considered commercial appeal to be as important as artistic rigor) certainly had no need to second-guess or apologize. If Aparajito is unsentimental, it is nonetheless enormously kind, offering a great deal of tearful sympathy to Sarbajaya while also understanding Apu's desire to continue growing as an independent adult, even if it means curtly rejecting his past life and home. That there can be no happy middle ground between these two reasonable people and their emotional needs is a bitter truth, one ripped out of Apu's sobbing form in a powerful climax, as the camera pulls back respectfully to leave the young man standing under a dead tree in an empty space to fully understand what he has given up in order to pursue his future. This is not the tragedy of melodramatic suffering as seen in Pather Panchali; it is the everyday tragedy of children becoming adults and realizing what that costs them, of parents finding that they are no longer needed and thus no longer wanted. In this simple, casual tragedy, Aparajito finds incredible power, and becomes one of cinema's greatest stories of human behavior.

Outside the Law: Joseph Losey's THE PROWLER

Friday, December 4th, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951) was written by Harry Gilbert, a graduate of Williams College (B.A., History). A 35mm print of The Prowler, will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen "35mm Forever" series on Sunday, December 6 at 2 p.m. The 35mm restored print screens courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation.

By Harry Gilbert

In a New York Times interview conducted a year before his death in 1984, Joseph Losey reflected on the ambivalent effects of the Hollywood blacklist. “Without it,” Losey mused, “I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm.” If Losey’s comments can be taken as indicators of his interests in social issues and investments in film as a mode of social critique, one could chart a trajectory that extends through the director’s oeuvre. In this respect, The Prowler (1951) is Losey par excellence.

The Prowler was produced at an historical moment in which the crime film was undergoing transformation. In the early 1940s, the plurality of crime films featured a “fugitive outsider” as the protagonist towards whom the camera structured the sympathies of the viewer. In this narrative, a working or middle class citizen, rather than the gangster or organized crime network of earlier crime films, comes into conflict with the law through false accusations or crimes of poverty, and subsequently resists social, political, and economic authority in an attempt to ascertain the true origins of the crime. Put differently, these films offered a critique of contemporary conditions that located guilt with hegemonic systems of power—the state and capitalism foremost among them—and situated the “fugitive outsider” as an ordinary person struggling to get by. This, when placed within the chiaroscuro sets of the urban environment, was film noir.

These films emerged during a period of violent and prolonged class conflict in Hollywood and the United States more broadly. Repression followed. Among other national and international factors, the House Un-American Activites Committee (HUAC) pressured unions to purify themselves of their more radical members and Hollywood studios to police—or blacklist—their more radical artists. This moment marked a shift in the dominant narratives of the crime film. By the 1950s, the police officer or detective became the protagonist, and the once sympathetic “fugitive outsider” became the criminal whose apprehension would show audiences the mechanisms of the criminal justice system and demonstrate the need to preserve order in the shadow of the Red Scare.

The Prowler, then, finds itself among a small group of films that persisted as once-effective avenues for social critique became increasingly foreclosed. Indeed, Losey goes so far as to provide a critique of the narrative shift itself. The story follows patrolman Webb Harwood (Van Heflin) to the suburban Los Angeles home of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), who had earlier reported a late-night prowler outside of her window. Both Webb and Susan aspire to attain the American Dream. Webb is just an “ordinary guy” from a working class background who “hates being a cop” and desires to one day own a motel so that he may “make money while he sleeps.” Webb hopes to forge a path for himself that his father was too complacent to take. For Webb, the acquisition of a wife is a part of this process, and he will do whatever it takes to secure that asset. Serendipitously, Susan grew up in the same town as Webb, but lived in the other, richer community. After a few years “knocking around” Hollywood, Susan marries disc jockey John Gilvray in a “happy,” “unexciting,” and, much to Susan’s dismay, childless marriage.

The development of a physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive relationship between Webb and Susan—despite what critics might say, the film has not persuaded me to believe that any of the interactions between the two are consensual—drives a narrative that theorizes and indicts how systems of power create the contexts in which individual decisions are made and poses questions about who is most effected and why, often with uneasy or absent answers. In a contemporary moment where the issue of race, gender, sexuality, and police oppression has re-entered mainstream (i.e., white) discourse due to the political work of people of color, these questions remain just as pressing today as they did when the film was first released.

The Prowler positions the figure of the cop outside of the law and thereby questions the role of the police, the decidedly illegal yet state-sanctioned means by which the law is enforced or skirted, and the privileges and pressures the role ordains upon a person—in this case, a man. The film thinks through the distinct ways the police as an institution exerts violence, in particular the patriarchal violence against women, and generates sympathy for itself. This critique, however, is tempered in ways that (I think) are important to consider as a viewer of the film. How does the characterization of Charles “Bud” Crocker (John Maxwell) suggest an exceptionalism to Webb that exculpates the police more generally? And how might the conclusion suggest that the police force is capable of regulating itself and thereby reinvest in the organization’s inviolability?

Susan registers the configurations of patriarchal forces in the 1950s, and her decisions enable her to survive. How might the camera-as-prowler implicate the viewer in the male gaze, one which Susan attempts to control through an internalized belief in the justice of the police and a recourse to carceral feminism? What does it mean for Susan to seek the security of marriage because of the precarity of Hollywood and capitalist labor markets for women? And how does the body of Susan become a site for masculine impotency, and how does she negotiate the repressive and creative potentials of this (im)position?

This prowler only exists outside of the frame, yet this role names the film, establishes the film, and makes possible the relationship between Webb and Susan. How do we think about the always-already racialized figure of the prowler and their visual absence from the film? Who is the “stranger” in the context of 1950s Los Angeles, with a particular history of white supremacist violence, redlining and policing neighborhoods, xenophobia, and colonialism? Bud asks us to think about how “There’s history slathered over every square foot of this country of ours.” In a film that commences with the racialized figure of the prowler, and stages the extrajudicial practices of the police and the endorsement of these measures by the state, the specter of lynching and white supremacist violence is not far. In a genre that that takes the white working class man as its subject and capitalist systems as the antagonistic object of inquiry, does The Prowler move beyond and critique this racist logic, or does it rely on them?

To pose, answer, and complicate these questions, The Prowler assembled a team of politically aligned artists who were masters of film noir. Losey himself had already directed two film noirs released in 1951 alone: a remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and The Big Night. Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted in 1947 for Soviet sympathies and connections to the Communist Party, composed a screenplay credited to close friend Hugo Butler, whose name would also soon be found on the blacklist. Boris Leven, whose recent filmography included noir classics Criss Cross (1949) from Robert Siodmak and House by the River (1950) from Lang, served as art director and hired uncredited—read: blacklisted—designer John Hubley, famous for his experiments in animation, to craft the film’s sets.

"The Apu Trilogy" 1: PATHER PANCHALI

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali was written by Tim Brayton, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A newly restored 4K DCP of Pather Panchali, the first film in Ray's Apu trilogy, will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, December 4, at 7 p.m.

By Tim Brayton

Following its triumph at the 1956 Cannes International Film Festival, Satyajit Ray's debut as writer and director, Pather Panchali [aka Song of the Little Road], was immediately put under the unfair burden of being the cinematic ambassador of Indian filmmaking in Europe and America. For it was the first film made on the subcontinent to enjoy any kind of meaningful international release, and the critics of the world were quick to identify it as a masterpiece. Which it is; but it's still the worst kind of cultural pandering. Of course, there isn't such a thing as "Indian filmmaking", only a collection of regional and linguistic filmmaking traditions. Even if that weren't the case, Pather Panchali wouldn't be the film to exemplify anything other than the latent talent of its creator: a graphic designer working in advertising, with the beating heart of a great cinephile.

In 1947, Ray co-founded the Calcutta Film Society, which would soon become one of the primary conduits by which that city's audiences could have any access to foreign films. It was around that year that he first hit upon the idea to adapt Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's 1928 novel Pather Panchali into a movie, though the mechanism for doing so wouldn't become clear to him for a few years. His resolve to become a filmmaker seems to have firmly solidified thanks to two events that occurred in 1950: first, he worked as location scout for Jean Renoir's The River; that autumn, in England, he first saw Bicycle Thieves, which became a primary influence and motivating force on his desire to go out and make a film on his own.

When Pather Panchali emerged—after years of no-budget production racing against the aging process of his juvenile leads—it was far more than just a riff on Italian neorealism. The film is an almost unclassifiable hybrid: the domestic setting and focus on the poverty of a rural family and especially that family's youngest child Apu (Subir Banerjee) are right line with the films of De Sica and Rossellini. So is the use of non-professional actors to make up the bulk of the cast, and the downplaying of any significant plot arc in favor of capturing the unfocused events of the everyday. But the visuals have an expressionistic quality that veers towards melodrama rather than realism: one of Pather Panchali's most striking sequences is a terrifying thunderstorm near the end, with flashes of light transforming the comforting domestic space of the family home into a horror film setting. The score, composed by future superstar sitar player Ravi Shankar, sounds as unabashedly Indian as the rest of the style is European, but this is nowhere near the everything-goes tradition of Hindi-language musicals that dominated Indian film production till then. Pather Panchali was one of the inaugural films in Parallel Cinema movement, a new wave of Bengali-language films derived from literary sources and favoring aesthetic and narrative realism.

Whatever national and international trends Pather Panchali borrows from or discards, what matters most is the film itself. This is one of the finest movies of the 1950s, and among the strongest directorial debuts ever. It is a particularly strong example of a child's-eye view film, though not dogmatically so. In fact, Apu is a mere baby for the first twenty minutes, at which point the action skips ahead, and he's reintroduced to us in a sequence in the annals of character introductions on par with John Ford's zoom into John Wayne early in Stagecoach: he sits up from bed into a dramatic close-up, at which point the score revs up and the film launches into a montage of childhood behavior. These montages show up frequently throughout the film, and they're cumulatively one of its strongest gestures: Shankar's plinking music provides a lulling rhythm, while the onscreen action combines disjointed moments into a single flow, not suggesting the passage of time but instead leaving us with a sense of a constant, eternal present.

Like many films about the experience of childhood, Pather Panchali includes a narrative that occurs above the awareness of its young protagonists, Apu and his older sister Durga (Uma Dasgupta): father Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) dreams of being a poet and artist, but must move away to the city to make a real living, while mother Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) retreats into her own depression as her woes pile up. It's to the great credit of everyone involved, especially Karuna Banerjee, whose reflective, sad performance is one of the great pieces of screen acting in the '50s, that this adult plotline is revealed to us with objective clarity, but without ever swamping the more delicate, aimless material surrounding Apu, who does, after all, remain the anchor of the film's superlative use of perspective. We see, generally, what Apu sees, but we understand more of it than he does. One of the key visual motifs in Pather Panchali are close-ups of Subir Banerjee's face, allowing his dark eyes to dominate our impressions as he stares out at the world around him, preternaturally watchful. We are encouraged, not to match his point-of-view—the close-ups tend to confirm the difference between the boy and the audience, not to elide that difference—but to look where he's looking, with the same intent gaze.

The result is a film that is most successful as a work of observation: settling down in a locale almost as unfamiliar to the urbanite Ray as to his earliest Western audiences, and just trying to see it, in all its fullness. This task becomes far more engaging than ever thanks to Janus Films' brand new 4K reconstruction of the film's badly burned camera negatives, which the Cinematheque will be showing as a DCP; after generations of muddy DVD and VHS transfers, Pather Panchali takes on a clarity and luminosity that very nearly make it a new film altogether. The shapes and textures of the world it depicts are more tangible, the realist aesthetic more overwhelming, and the lives depicted all the more vivid. It is the best possible way to experience a film whose intensely intimate depiction of physically palpable humanity has always been its greatest strength.

MUR MURS & DOCUMENTEUR: Agnès Varda in Los Angeles

Wednesday, November 18th, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Agnès Varda's Mur Murs and Documenteur (both 1981) was written by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Mur Murs and Documenteur will both screen on Saturday, November 21, beginning at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. The program will begin with a special introduction by Kelley Conway, Professor of Film, author of Contemporary Film Director's: Agnès Varda, now available from Univeristy of Illinois Press.

By Jenny Oyallon-Koloski

Agnès Varda enjoys filming real people. She says as much in Varda par Agnès, suggesting that she likes “watching them put themselves into the scene, listening to the way they talk, observing their gestures, their settings, and the objects they surround themselves with.” Her children, Rosalie Varda-Demy and Mathieu Demy, would agree with her. The latter proposes in an interview that his mother has always chosen to work with reality, in stark contrast to his father, fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy, who stresses instead “the importance of tales and wonder.”

Varda and Demy spent several years in Los Angles at the end of the 1960s, during which time she became fascinated with the proliferation of murals around the city. A subsequent visit to California from 1979 to 1981 revitalized the interest, and Varda spent months inventorying and studying the neighborhood-specific art forms. Made in part thanks to a grant from the French Ministry of Culture, Murs Murs (1981) is the result of Varda’s determination to discover the creators behind these murals and interview them by their art. “Murs has all the sun and glory of Los Angeles,” the filmmaker tells Variety: “It’s all in there—the bad, like gang killings, as well as the good. But it’s very alive. And the people I filmed say incredible things about this city, about the dream-like quality of life here.” As Varda and her editor, Sabine Mamou, were finishing the final cut, an idea for a new film—about a woman struggling with the recent separation from her husband—emerged like the “shadow,” as Varda recalls, of the first.

As a continuation of her interest in non-actors, Varda links her narrative strategies in Documenteur (1981) to several of her earlier works—La Pointe Courte (1955), L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), and Cleo de 5 à 7 (1962)—in which she also films everyday people in a documentary style and juxtaposes these images with the fictionalized concerns of her protagonists. The film’s Variety reviewer finds that “Varda has a great eye for composition, with remarkably bleak but arresting shots of the beach where the woman works, accompanied by well-chosen minimalist shots of the city and beach plus montages of blank, lonely faces.” But Varda’s subsequent Los Angeles-based project is also a family affair. Sabine Mamou emerged as the natural choice in Varda’s mind to play Emilie because of her presence during the early planning stages but also because “she was like a part of the family.” The natural choice, then, to play Emilie’s son, Martin, was Mathieu Demy.

The incorporation of friends and family, especially, into her work is not unusual for Varda’s filmmaking practice, or for the greater Varda-Demy household. Rosalie Varda-Demy can be seen in Varda’s earlier film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) and had small roles as a child in some of Demy’s films, notably playing Genvieve’s daughter at the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). She subsequently pursued a career as a costume designer, working on several of Demy’s later films as well as Varda’s Vagabond (1985). Mathieu Demy, now a professional actor and filmmaker, appears in Varda’s Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) and Kung-Fu Master! (1988), while also playing a bit role in Demy’s final feature of the same year, Trois places pour le 26 (1988). His presence in Documenteur seems to have stuck with him the most, however, as he incorporates shots from Varda’s film into his directorial debut, Americano (2011). As Varda explains before a 2014 screening of her film at the Cinémathèque française, her son’s desire to incorporate parts of Documenteur motivated a restoration that appealed to both parties, since “he got the bits he wanted, and I got the rest.” The choice to cast family members in her film, especially, allows us to observe what Mathieu Demy refers to as Varda’s “re-appropriation of reality.”

We should be wary of taking these people’s realities and Varda’s portrayals of them at face value. The pun in Documenteur (menteur = liar) suggests as much. But we also cannot completely separate the film’s fictionalized account of a woman and her son’s struggles from Varda’s separation from Jacques Demy during this period; “like much of Varda’s work” Variety suggests, “the film is more than a little autobiographical.” Rosalie mentions in an interview that Documenteur was an emotionally difficult film for her to watch at the time of its making, given its “focus on Agnès’ suffering.” Mathieu also remembers the early 1980s as a painful period, but recalls with pleasure his time roller-skating around Los Angles with his father. A photograph from Varda’s collection shows the duo in action, with a series of abstract murals framing them in the background. Like Mathieu and Jacques Demy skating around Venice Beach, Varda’s films and their blend of reality and fiction will never cease to keep us on our toes.

Born in Wisconsin in 1914, legendary director of animation John Hubley didn’t even make it out of art school before he was picked up to work professionally with Disney. John then left Disney during a 1941 strike, eventually becoming creative director of the innovative animation studio UPA, which produced memorable series with characters likeGerald McBoing Boing and Mr. Magoo. However, Disney had turned the strikers’ names into the House Un-American Activities Committe, resulting in John’s forced exit from UPA. While evading HUAC, he started directing an animated adaptation of the Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, featuring the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. However, the severely anti-communist IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) realized John had not testified for HUAC and demanded he do so. John stayed strong and refused to name names. Without the influential trade union’s support, however, funding for Finian’s was pulled and the project was destroyed. However, John still came out on top. In 1955, John Hubley and Finian’s editor/script girl Faith Elliott ⎯ friends of 10 years ⎯ were married.

Up to this point, Faith Elliott had lived an exceptional life of her own. She left her home in Hell’s Kitchen at 15, in reaction to her father’s insistence that she become a dentist. At 18, Faith moved to Los Angeles, where many jobs in the movie industry had opened for women because of the war. There she learned how to paint, helped form a film society, and taught a small class on Marxism, all while maintaining work at different studios. Faith eventually returned to New York City, continuing her work in the film industry through projects like Go Man Go (1955), a James Wong Howe-directed film about the Harlem Globetrotters, on which she served as editor.

While in New York, she was hired to work with John Hubley on Finian’s Rainbow and returned again to LA. John and Faith had met previously in LA while he was in the army, and they had remained friends. A very early collaboration occurred on a partially-animated sex education film; John worked on the animation of the menstrual cycle, and Faith worked on the live action. Thus far they had kept romantic tensions in check, but their friendship was tested when Faith went to work with John ⎯ who was already married with children ⎯ on Finian’s. They folded, and in 1955 they married and then moved to NYC where John had opened up a branch of his production company, Storyboard. Of this Faith said, “all I knew was that this was the luckiest moment in my life, and that one could influence the outcome of one's life if one was clear about what one wanted to do.”

John and Faith, starting to raise their new family, made an agreement to both make a film every year and eat dinner as a family every night. These sentiments reflect both the artistic rigor and the love of children that would show up in their films. In The Best of John and Faith Hubley, three shorts have a narrative explicitly driven by children: Adventures of an * (1956), the Academy Award-winning Moonbird (1959), and the program’s highlight, Windy Day (1968).

Adventures of an * is about a small child whose playful spirit eventually wins over his all-business father. Faith said of it, “the film turned out to be a visual experience about the vision of a little child, which is so pure and so wonderful…” Depicting play with what looks like moving Matisse cut outs, the Hubleys poignantly realize the purity of vision to which Faith refers.

Moonbird uses the improvised world and dialogue of John and Faith’s real life sons, who playfully bicker about trying to capture the titular bird, as fodder for the film’s story. Funnily enough, the film was funded through advertisements John and Faith had made for the cereal Maypo, featuring the character Marky Maypo. Wanting to evoke a sense of naturalism, Marky Maypo was voiced by their son, giving the piece the same general quality of Moonbird. The massive success of the ad campaign, as well as the Academy Award win for Moonbird, can be read as a popular enjoyment of being able to again look at everyday items or stories as child might.

Working with their daughters in 1968, Windy Day visualizes the playful interaction of their daughters Georgia and Emily, and consists partly of made up theater and partly of sisterly heart-to-heart. Windy Day’s narrative and physical world is completely formed and broken by the girls’ dialogue ⎯ to an even greater degree than Moonbird ⎯ and is guided by light, suggestive, watercolor. In her essay “Two Sisters,” Amy Lawrence writes of how, in Windy Day, “sisterhood becomes a space wherein the emergent female subject encounters both challenges to and support for her evolution into a powerful, capable, singular subject.” Lawrence’s quote gets at the depth with which a “Windy Day” depicts both the beauty and difficulties of a sibling relationship.

John and Faith would make films, features, and shorts together for two full decades, implementing both radical style and politics into their films. Together they had two sons, Mark and Ray, and two daughters, Georgia ⎯ of Yo La Tengo ⎯ and Emily, who also makes animated films. In 1977, at Yale, John died during heart surgery, while Faith continued making animated films, surviving a 1974 cancer diagnosis, until she, too, passed in 2001. Faith had produced another 20-plus years’ worth of material between John’s passing and her own, ranging from the autobiographical to the spiritual. In 1995, almost 50 years after John and Faith worked on an educational film covering the same topic, Emily made a beautiful short film about menstruation called Her Grandmother’s Gift (1995). In a strange reversal of Windy Day, Faith voices herself, talking to her grandchild about her changing body in grand, cosmic, context. Like John and Faith had done with Windy Day, Emily uses animation to reflect upon family, forming a whole world inside the moment of two lives merging.

THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES: Soviet Surrealism

Monday, November 9th, 2015

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova, 1969) was written by James Steffen, Ph.D., the Film and Media Studies Librarian at Emory University and author of The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). Steffen will introduce a screening of the film at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 13 in 4070 Vilas Hall. The screening will be followed by a talk about the film and its restoration.

The 2014 restoration is by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, in association with the National Cinema Centre of Armenia and Gosfilmofond of Russia. Restoration funding provided by the Material World Charitable Foundation and The Film Foundation.

By James Steffen

Martin Scorsese, a longtime admirer of Parajanov’s work and the driving force behind this restoration, wrote in the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival catalog: “Watching Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, or Sayat Nova, is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed. On a very basic level, it’s a biography of the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, but before all else it’s a cinematic experience, and you come away remembering images, repeated expressive movements, costumes, objects, compositions, colors.”

The Color of Pomegranates offers a poetic fantasy on the life and poetry of Sayat-Nova, the pen name for Arutin Sayadyan (ca. 1712-1795), an Armenian poet-troubadour (ashugh) whose songs are still commonly performed today. During the 1960s, Sayat-Nova was officially celebrated in the Soviet Union both as a great Armenian national poet and as a symbol of the brotherhood of the peoples of the Transcaucasus, since he wrote in three languages: Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian. For Parajanov, the film represented a kind of homecoming to his birthplace of Tbilisi and his ethnic Armenian roots. Up to this point, he had worked exclusively in Ukraine after completing his diploma at the VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) in Moscow.

The basic plot outline more or less follows popular biographical legend: Sayat-Nova’s education in the Sanahin monastery in northern Armenia; his childhood in Tbilisi as the son of carpet-weavers; his youth as an ashugh; his service as a court poet to King Irakli II; his scandalous love for Princess Anna; his retreat to the Haghpat monastery; and his martyrdom during the sacking of Tbilisi by the troops of the Persian king Agha Mohammad Khan. Along the way Parajanov introduces striking, at times baffling visual metaphors, surreal dream-visions, and an undercurrent of bawdy humor. Despite these provocations, the film expresses a profound reverence for the peoples of the Transcaucasus, their historical travails, and their deeply spiritual creative vision.

Parajanov explained his approach in a 1969 interview for the annual Soviet film almanac Ekran: “We want to show the world in which the ashugh [Sayat-Nova] lived, the sources that nourished his poetry, and for that reason national architecture, folk art, nature, daily life, and music will play a large role in the film’s pictorial decisions. We are recounting the epoch, the people, their passions and thoughts through the conventional, but unusually precise language of things. Handicrafts, clothing, rugs, ornaments, fabrics, the furniture in their living quarters – these are the elements. From these the material look of the epoch arises.”

In fact, this fascination with handcrafted objects is a key trait of Parajanov’s mature filmmaking style. Although viewers tend to remember his international breakthrough Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) for its vertiginous camerawork, already a significant portion of that film consists of still life compositions and tableaux. In The Color of Pomegranates Parajanov explicitly invokes medieval Armenian and Persian miniature painting in the film’s deliberately flattened pictorial style. Combined with the film’s startling jump cuts, Méliès-style magic tricks, and richly textured, collage-like soundtrack, it creates an aesthetic that is at once austere and achingly sensual.

The film survives in two distinct versions. This restored version represents the original 1969 Armenian theatrical release, which ran at 77 minutes under the title Nran guyne (“The Color of Pomegranates”) and had Armenian language-credits and intertitles. Although this is the version which Parajanov signed off for release, it was the product of a protracted battle with various censorship bodies and other officials, among them the Communist Party of Armenia, who felt that the film took too many liberties with Sayat-Nova’s life. Alexei Romanov, the chair of Goskino, the USSR state film committee, further complained that the film failed to teach Soviet audiences about “the real life journey of the great poet of Transcaucasia and his place in the development of Armenian national culture.” As a result, not only was the film’s title changed from Sayat Nova, but all of the references to Sayat-Nova were removed from the chapter titles and likely from portions of the soundtrack as well. The new chapter titles, written by the popular Armenian novelist Hrant Matevosyan, are poetically evocative but hardly help situate the viewer in the proceedings.

The more widely known version, intended for Soviet-wide and later international distribution, was reedited by the filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich and runs at 73 minutes, with entirely new Russian-language credits and chapter titles. Yutkevich had reviewed the original script for Goskino, admired the film, and wanted to overcome the impasse with Romanov, who had permitted distribution only within Armenia. Mainly Yutkevich attempted to simplify the presentation, but he also rearranged some shots to make the film more ideologically palatable and removed some of its patently bizarre imagery. For many years it was the only version available anywhere, though Yutkevich deserves credit for enabling the film to be seen. Despite its challenges and compromises, the Armenian release version gives us a more direct line into Parajanov’s mind.